‘Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric’ (1989)

You might see a few of these posts appear, over the next couple of days, due to a combination of my working round the corner from Forbidden Planet (money is made to be spent) and Sue & Hope being elsewhere for a couple of days. I get to watch some Doctor Who instead of ‘Happy Feet’ or ‘Peppa Pig’. It’s. Like. Heaven…

Anyway...

If you talk to people (of a certain age) about Doctor Who the conversation inevitably includes the phrase ‘hiding behind the sofa’. It just does. Having seen a couple of really old episodes I have no idea why people felt the urge to do this back in the day but there you go.
We certainly never hid behind the sofa in the eighties when I did the bulk of my ‘Doctor Who watching’. This was probably because our parents kept telling us it wasn’t real (although thinking about it, I imagine they were trying to convince themselves so they didn’t end up hiding behind the sofa again…)
I never hid behind the sofa, not once, but there was one story that scared me so much that, when I went to bed, I hid under my duvet and didn’t come out until the next day. That story was ‘The Curse of Fenric’ and I watched it again last night. A couple of Southern Comfort & cokes made the whole thing a little less scary but I still found myself locking the back door. There were noises out in the garden…

The Doctor and Ace find themselves at a secret military base, during the Second World War, where elements of the British army are about to lure their Russian allies into a deadly trap. A far deadlier trap is about to be sprung though as an ancient evil stirs beneath the waters of the bay and an old Viking Curse comes to fruition. Only those with faith will survive and, even then, they may not have much left afterwards…

I’m as guilty as the next person of thinking of the old Doctor Who series as slightly shoddy affairs with wobbly sets and guys dressed up as aliens who are always conveniently defeated at the very last second. ‘The Curse of Fenric’ is actually a really sly piece of horror that creeps up on you and delivers chills right when you least expect them. I’m talking clawed hands rising out of the sea to drag down soldiers and a church under siege by mouldy looking vampires that have risen from a watery grave (they do look suspiciously rubbery but no less scary for that). There are really nasty echoes of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ here and watching ‘The Curse of Fenric’ did have me wondering if that was where it all started for me and my love of zombies. Maybe…

It’s not all about the obvious horror though. The horror of war is examined in pretty close detail, for a show that was Saturday teatime viewing, and you get to see how this affects people’s faith in different ways. It all boils down to how much you believe in what you’re fighting for. When the curse of Fenric really takes hold this can mean the difference between life and death (yours)…

The story itself is very tightly plotted (with a couple of exceptions) and shows roots in previous stories. It all ties together very well although I had very little idea what Ace was talking about half the time (attempts at deep and meaningful falling flat here) and I did have to wonder how effective the big villain really was. I mean, would you kill off your troops when the battle was still being fought? No, me neither…

Sylvester McCoy makes up for a lot of this though with a dark, brooding performance that hints at a battle fought outside the confines of the TV show; a battle that I wouldn’t mind reading more about.

All in all then, ‘The Curse of Fenric’ is as unsettling now as it was back in 1989 and it stands up pretty well to the test of time. It’s not often that one of these DVDs has me looking for the book but I’m seriously tempted…